Y12 D79

First off, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my sister. If I'm not mistaken she turns 50 today. Ha ha. Welcome to the downslide. It's all worse from here. Seriously I hope she has a good day despite being in this world.

I made myself more depressed yesterday by looking at the stats page again. Let's go look again and statr our morning off right, shall we? OH BOY! 515 new cases yesterday with 9 more dead here in the state. Gee. 55k country wide with just under 1500 new deaths. Whee! Why, gosh golly we might hit 200,000 dead before the end of the month at this rate! Such pride! Florida added 8,000 new cases! Good job FL! Maybe that sheriff who said no one could wear a mask in HIS building helped! What a swell guy! And you wonder why I don't want to leave the house.

Been playing HZD. Okay, I have to complain first about the technical issues. Like a lot of people I am experiencing rough issues playing this game. Crashes, stuttering, dropped frames. I have tweaked the shit out of my machine including going so far as buying a separate external SSD drive to host my steam library. I needed that anyway as my large drive is regular SATA and the read/write rates weren't hot. But it is crazy that I paid more for an external 2tb SSD than I did for the 16tb external I recently bought. Regardless, with it on an SSD, with VSYNC tweaked, with settings adjusted, I can get it to play. It still stutters, but at least it doesn't crash when it does. They need to fix it now.

But even though it has issues, man I am loving the story in this game. I keep finding these old log files that describe the world pre-whatever it is that we're in. I think I am in the UK or New Zealand. Can't quite tell yet. The story though is fascinating to me. Especially when looked at through the lens of the current world situation. It hits a little close to home. Enough that I keep playing because I want to know the true story of this land. It also has a matrix feel in some places which I like. Machines building machines but why? What for? I expect this to take hundreds of hours to truly find everything in the game. That I like. I want to know I got my money's worth.

Spent the majority of the day writing demos. I was supposed to have a class today but it got cancelled last minute. Oh well. More demo writing for me. Whee. September is looking pretty solid with private engagements which is good. It's about the time when things pick up anyway so this is on par with my expectations. Maybe next year I will just take all of July off to minimize the pain. We shall see.

Made mac and cheese for dinner. B had a Skype session with our friends in Australia. They're under strict lockdown in Melbourne. You know what? People there are actually following orders! What a shock! That's honestly what we need here. STRICT lockdown for one month minimum. Then things might turn a corner. Until then, I don't expect those stats to change favorably.

That's about it for me for now. Time to make some demos.